Finding the Words to Recovery
After three strokes, an actress learns to speak again.
Roald Dahl wrote some of the world’s best-loved children’s books. Less well known is the autobiography of PATRICIA NEAL, his wife of 30 years, which powerfully portrays how regaining her speech was the first step towards her recovery from a debilitating stroke at the age of 39
THE STROKE
Patricia describes the moment the stroke struck, while bathing her daughter Tessa and pregnant with her fifth child in 1965. “I soaped the cloth and began rubbing her shoulders,” she writes in As I Am: An Autobiography. “It was a special moment with my daughter. A pain shot through my head. Maybe I overdid it today, I thought, I shouldn’t be bending. I stood up.” As the pain grew more intense Patricia began seeing things and remembers Roald asking her, “What sort of things?” She couldn’t tell him; she had forgotten.
“I suffered three strokes altogether. One at home and two in the hospital. The third was the one that did me in. No one believed I would make it. A team of doctors conducted an operation that lasted seven hours. They opened my skul l and found that I had suffered an aneurysm. I was as one dead. Gone. Even my obituary was picked up and published by several newspapers.
“The aneurysm was congenital, meaning it ran in my family. My life had been slowly building to that moment while bathing Tessa. For 39 years I had lived with no knowledge that some evil force lurked in my head, just waiting.”
According to the Stroke Foundation, 27,428 Australians experienced a stroke in 2020: that’s around one every 19 minutes. A further 445,087 live with the effects of stroke.
LEARNING TO SPEAK AGAIN
Patricia had no speech af ter her stroke and describes how her mind “just didn’t work”. Even listening was hard. “Trying to listen to two people was like watching a tennis game, and a roomful of guests was like being on a firing range, words shoot ing past me like bul lets,” she writes. “Once in a while there would be a word I understood, and for a second I knew exact ly what was being said. But before I could focus thoughts and trap words of my own, I would forget what I had heard.”
Singing was the key to unlocking her speech, as it can be for many stroke survivors. Patricia remembers her nurse Jean Alexander washing her feet and singing, ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’. Suddenly Patricia chimed in, just one word. “After
SINGING WAS THE KEY TO UNLOCKING HER SPEECH, AS IT CAN BE FOR MANY STROKE SURVIVORS
22 days of silence, one word,” she reminisces. “So Jean sang her head off and I found more and more words to join in, to everyone’s relief, since it showed neither my voice nor speech was destroyed. The whole hospital would come to hear me.”
Patricia found it hard to find the right word to say and would create nonsensical words, using ‘oblogon’ or ‘crooked steeple’ for cigarette, for example. Inspired, Roald created the weird and wonderful language of the beloved children’s classic The BFG, inventing the trogglehumper, the quogwinkle, squinky squiddlers and snozzcumbers to name but a few.
LEARNING HOW TO WALK AGAIN
Mobility problems are common after stroke. Immobility, even for a short time, can result in muscle wastage, pneumonia, pressure sores and
deep vein thrombosis. Physiotherapy and even functional electrical st imulat ion can help strengthen muscles and assist with movement problems after a stroke.
“Rehabilitation is not pleasant and it takes work, work, work” said Patricia after her recovery. “From the time I got up in the morning until I went to bed at night, everything I had to do fought my natural inclination, which was to just lay myself down and let it all work itself out”.
It took years for Patricia to rebuild the muscles in her right leg and her right hand never fully recovered.
LEARNING THROUGH LOSS
Patricia experienced more losses than most in her lifetime, losing a daughter to measles, a baby who sustained a brain injury, Roald through infidelity and her mobility and independence after her stroke.
She learnt though several life-affirming lessons as a stroke survivor: first, that the brain has a “magic gift for healing”; second, that loss can force you to make surprising – and often blessed – choices; third, and most poignantly, that her progress was important to the morale of
others. She was no longer watched just as an actress, “but as a public survivor”.
After her recovery, Neal returned to acting, earning a second Academy Award nomination for The Subject Was Roses (1968). She appeared in a number of TV roles in the 1970s and 1980s and won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Dramatic TV Movie in 1971 for her role in The Homecoming.
PATRICIA’S LEGACY
Hope and healing and accepting help from others are abiding themes in Patricia’s autobiography.
She attributes her recovery to an inspirational teacher called Valerie Eaton Griffith – and an army of committed volunteers. Patricia’s story, and countless others like hers, are a testament to the power of another’s support through illness. Valerie set up the ‘Volunteer Stroke Scheme’ across Britain (with more than 1500 volunteers in total), recognising the skilled, selfless support of others as essential in stroke survival and recovery.
To this day, volunteers remain a vital part of the work of Stroke Associations across the world. Mentors, befrienders and peer supporters help survivors to relearn skills and regain independence.
WHAT PART MIGHT YOU PLAY?
To find out how you can volunteer at the Stroke Foundation, go to: strokefoundation.org.au/ How-you-can-help/Get-involved/ Volunteering-at-NSF